5/26/2009 @ 8:10PM

Facebook's New Perspective

There’s an old Russian proverb: If your face looks skewed, don’t blame the mirror. Here’s a new one, per Facebook Chief Mark Zuckerberg: Take in enough perspectives and one is bound to look the way you want it to.

That’s what the social network got Tuesday with a $200 million investment from Russian holding company Digital Sky Technologies. The investment is aimed at infusing Facebook with new monetization schemes but it also keeps the social network’s valuation high at $10 billion.

“We’ve been talking to a bunch of different folks about potentially working together,” Zuckerberg says. “For us this was really about having extra cushion if we want to explore different strategic options.”

Facebook shopped around for an investor, but it is said that U.S. investors don’t think the company is worth $10 billion. It’s likely that none of the potential investors questioned Facebook’s dominance in the social network sector, but rather its ability to make money long term.

Presumably, that’s what was behind the rumored $3 billion valuation gap that separated what Facebook executives thought the company was worth and what private equity firms like Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Bain Capital were willing to pay for a piece of the action. It’s also what’s believed to be behind the recent departure of Chief Financial Officer Gideon Yu.

Yuri Milner, chief executive at Digital Sky Technologies, says he saw the matter quite differently. His firm is the sole investor in vKontakte, Russia’s most popular social network. The site is the second most popular in Russia according to Alexa, claiming some 35 million users. Facebook is No. 59 in Russia and has roughly 200,000 users in the country, but it has 200 million users worldwide.

After having success with various monetization models, including micro-payments, for vKontakte, Milner sees such business models working for Facebook.

“What we see is that on a per-user basis, our companies are monetized significantly better than Facebook today,” he says. “If our networks monetize better than Facebook on a per-user basis, this is not a very complicated decision for us. … We came with an understanding that social networks can be monetized to a much greater extent.”

Zuckerberg likes the outside perspective. “One of the things that’s truly interesting about talking to the folks at DST is just how many different models worked and have worked,” he says. “That doesn’t make us change our strategy in any way, but it is a directional indicator.”

The Facebook chief executive says the new investment money could come in handy if the company grows faster than expected or if it wants to make acquisitions or hire top talent.

“We’re not looking to use this for anything immediately now,” he says. “The question is: What might come up in the future?”